


Cold

by a_strange_bit_of_something



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Assassins, Brainwashing, F/M, Hydra, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Past Violence, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Soviet Union, soviet spouses, the Russian Winter, winterwidow - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 09:47:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2020434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_strange_bit_of_something/pseuds/a_strange_bit_of_something
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Widow had a teacher who saw things that weren't quite there.<br/>It made her wonder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold

She is sixteen. She is sixteen and young and bold and bright with the unquenchable energy of youth that even her training couldn’t stifle. They are going to make her a legacy, they tell her. She’s not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but it’s what she has prepared for all her life, and so it must be something important. Maybe not good. But important.  
She wants to be ready, but they tell her no. Wait. You will have one more teacher.  
This makes her shake her head and laugh, but quietly; she must keep the sound to herself.  
He is tall, tall with dark hair and a hard mouth, hard eyes. On the first day, she asks to touch his arm and he looks at her, just looks until she picks up her gun again and blasts another target. The metal is ice cold to the touch, she imagines.  
He is good at what he does. She understands now why they don’t speak about him. Even the program is in awe of its finest creation.  
He disappears sometimes. We must run tests, one of the white-coated scientists tells her. His condition is very particular. You mean his arm? she asks.  
A man scolds her and shuts her out of the office.  
Her teacher is sometimes distracted. He likes to look at things she cannot see. By then she has learned not to ask; questions only bring trouble from others, silence from him. Once he catches her staring and snaps at her that they are done for the day before stalking away.  
She doesn’t see him for two days.  
She can’t resist. What does he do? she asks one day, carefully, quietly. She is smart—the man she asks is young and new, and she is pretty.  
He smiles slightly. Wetworks, he says in a voice half-mocking, half-fearful, Bloody affairs. And he’s very efficient.  
Killing is all the same to her, but the man speaks as if there is something different about what the metal-armed man does. She lies in her bed that night and thinks. When she wakes up she decides that that must be why her teacher sees other things.  
They tell her she is ready. She asks him if she is—somehow only his opinion seems to matter—and her teacher tilts his head up and smirks, not quite a smile, but he must have meant yes because that night they strap her to a table and give her something to drink and then she doesn’t remember anymore.  
The next morning her head hurts. She has trouble remembering faces. For hours she tries to conjure them. Eventually she lets them go.  
Tomorrow they’re shipping her out for her first assignment. Widow, they call her now.  
They’re sending him away, too, only for much longer. She goes to say good-bye.  
He’s sitting on the edge of his bed in his tiny compartment, tossing a knife up in the air and watching it fall back to his hand. What do you want? he says. She blinks and can’t remember why she came.  
I’m leaving, she says and the blade spins up, up.  
I have a question, she says and he catches the knife and stares. What’s your name?  
He blinks at her. His gaze shifts past her to one of the things that she can’t see.  
She is turning to leave when he says James.  
James. She smiles.  
Good-bye, James.  
As she walks into the hall she hears him. Good-bye, Natalia.  
She doesn’t look, but she likes to imagine he smiles.

Now she is older, stronger, harder. The Widow is good at what she does. She understands what a legacy is now: a blood stain. She doesn’t ask questions and sometimes she sees things that aren’t quite there.  
She receives her first true wound and it terrifies her, watching the blood slip out of her own body and onto the white tiles. The person she is sent to kill lies bent over in his chair, face leaking red across his desk. She has been too quick, has stepped right into this trap and now they will catch her. The Widow lets her head fall back against the wall. There is red on her lips now, too.  
She hears a gunshot, two, three. Someone tall is standing over her. He looks down at where her hand is pressing and lifts her up into his arms. His arm is cold against her skin and she shivers when her fingertips brush it.  
He takes her back with him, makes sure she sends her report in, wraps the gauze around her waist and wipes the blood off her cheeks. She talks to him, tells him about her legacy. Something about his face distracts her. Something in the shadows under his eyes.  
They’ve made her cold, too, she tells him.  
I understand cold, he says.  
He looks at her for the first time, really looks at her. You’ve gotten older.  
She stares at him. You haven’t changed at all.  
She falls asleep with her head on his shoulder.

They stay together now. She calls him James, and he calls her Natalia. These are good times. A new kind of legacy, she thinks. Maybe not good, but something better.  
They are the fist of the mother country, a force of their own. The Russian Winter, she hears once down an echoing hall. She tells him that later that night and he laughs as he cleans his knives, metal sliding between his fingers.  
This assignment is particularly messy. A dinner party. The dance hall is packed, suits and dresses standing shoulder to shoulder. They send him in and she locks the door, but the wood does nothing to soften the sounds.  
She washes the blood from his knuckles that night and he watches her work with a strange expression, staring.  
Plans change—some kind of a scuffle higher up the chain, dragging those below in the mud with it. They are sending her home to clean up. She asks about him. What is happening to him? We are putting him to rest, they say and she feels a different kind of cold in her chest.  
That night as they lie together she rubs her hand down his back and he tangles his fingers deep into her hair. They try to see each other, but their eyes keep finding other things.

She is sitting in a tight train compartment on her way to Moscow. Stifling. There is frost around the window’s edge and the wind rattles the glass panes. The Widow traces her finger across its clouded surface.  
It’s ice cold to the touch.


End file.
